


shadow boxes

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Discussions of Disordered Eating, F/M, bittersweet and open ended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-02 03:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17256866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: Just because they aren’t together, doesn’t mean they’re not in love.





	1. Words of Affirmation

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the [reylo charity anthology](http://reylocharityanthology.tumblr.com)
> 
> This fic shares a title with an unpublished song by a dear friend that was loosely Reylo-vibed, though the theme/tone is a little different.

He sees her again at a party and it feels like a movie.

The music dulls in his ears, the heat of everyone in the room sends a chill across his spine, and movement seems to slow because Rey is there, chatting happily with her friends, looking like a memory.  She’s wearing a gold dress, and her hair is pulled back from her face because she hates it when her hair gets in her eyes. _Why don’t you cut it, then?_ he had asked her one night while she’d been cuddled up next to him.

_ Because then I’d have to cut it all the time.  At least now I can cut it when it’s too much, and keep it out of my face in the interim. _

He swallows, and tries to regain the present.  Hux has already pushed his way into the house, undoubtedly to pick a fight with Dameron.  He hasn’t even noticed that Ben’s not shadowing him anymore.

_I should go,_ he thinks, unable to take his eyes off Rey.

 _You should go,_ she had told him, closing the door in his face that last time.  But he can’t bring himself to move right now as he stares at her.

She doesn’t look happy.

Well, she does to the naked eye, to someone who might not know what Rey when she’s unhappy looks like.  Rey’s got a smile that dazzles like the sun, and she’s generous with it around people she cares about—but she doesn’t always smile out of happiness.  She smiles to convince herself that she should smile. That she should be happy. That everyone around her is happy so why can’t she be happy too?

And she’s smiling right now as she chats with Finn and Rose, all of them nursing glasses of some sort of alcohol.

But she doesn’t look happy, even though she’s smiling.

And Ben’s never been happy.  Except, briefly, in moments with Rey.  She’d been happy with him too, for a time.

And she’s not happy now.

_I should go,_ Ben thinks again.  Finn and Rose are fiercely protective of her.  He’s gotten into fights with Finn about Rey before.  Rey had always hated those. Finn won’t let him near her now.  Not when she’d said, _you should go._

 _Well, Finn can go fuck himself,_ Ben thinks savagely as he makes his way through the room towards her.   He’s tall and wide and his neutral expression is an angry one that parts the crowds easily.  

Finn sees him coming first.  “Hey, man,” Finn says, stepping forward.  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“She can speak for herself,” Ben snarls.

“And maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you,” Rose repeats with a jut in her jaw, joining Finn, arms crossed.  Sometimes he finds it hard to believe that he and Rose are the same species. Rose is so short she barely comes up to his chest, but she packs a punch and looks like she’s not afraid to use it.  

Ben’s eyes snap to Rey.  The smile is gone now. Her eyes look like they did when she’d closed the door, and Ben feels all the air rush out of him, feels the room go still and quiet again even though no one’s stopped dancing, no one’s stopped talking.  

“Fine,” he manages, and turns away.  He sees Hux and Dameron arguing loudly, but doesn’t go to them.

Instead he makes his way to the front door of the house and out into the night.

He doesn’t leave, though.  Hux is his ride.

And it’s not like he really wants to leave.  He just—she doesn’t want him near her. So he won’t be near her.

Even if he hasn’t really left, even if he’s still near her.

He sits on the front steps and pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and lets the nicotine into his lungs.  

“You started smoking again.”

He almost jumps out of his skin when he turns to see Rey standing behind him in her gold dress.  She doesn’t smile at him. Her arms are crossed over her chest and he’s sure she’s cold. It’s not that it’s cold outside, it’s unseasonably warm, actually, because global warming is destroying the planet, but Rey’s from warmer climes and always gets chilly.  Ben shrugs out of the light jacket he’s wearing and hands it to her.

“No,” she says.

“Take it,” he says.

“Ben—”

“Take it or go back inside.”

She takes it and sits down next to him on the stoop.  He takes another draw from his cigarette.

“That’ll kill you,” she reminds him.

“The stress’ll get me long before the cigarettes,” he retorts.  His doctor always looks panicked when he goes in for a physical and they take his blood pressure.  He exercises a lot, he’s really fit, but his resting heart rate ain’t exactly low. “The cigarettes might even keep the stress from getting me.”

“Why are you here?” she asks him quietly.

“Because Hux likes to get in Dameron’s grill and he needs someone for back up because lord knows he’s too much of a weasel to help himself if it gets physical.”

“So you’re here to beat up Poe.”

“Or at least to watch Hux get the shit kicked out of him as he so richly deserves.”

“Why did you come over?” she asks him.  “If you’re here for Hux. Why didn’t you just stay away?”

Her voice is getting thick, he can hear it—that subtle way that it drops in pitch because she’s trying to hide that she’s close to tears.  When he looks at her out of the corner of his eye, he sees that her eyes are bright even as she determinedly refuses to look at him. She’s biting her lip to keep from crying.

_You left me, remember?_ he thinks about demanding angrily.  Maybe if she were his dad—certainly if she were his uncle.  But she’s neither. She’s Rey, and she’s cold, and she’s not happy despite her sunshine smile and her gold dress.

“You looked sad,” he says and now it’s his turn to drop the pitch in his voice, to try to hide the way that annoying lump has lodged itself in his throat.

“It’s none of your business if I look sad or not,” she tells him.  “Not anymore.”

He turns away from her, taking another drag on his cigarette.  “And it’s none of your business if I smoke anymore,” he replies.  

“Shut up,” she snaps at him.  “That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“You know it is.  You’re not responsible for my happiness anymore, Ben, but you slowly killing yourself and setting a bad example for children is everyone’s business.”

“It’s really not,” he says.  She sounds like his mother. Is it strange that he’s missed that?  “Why are you sad?”

“Stop it,” she tells him.

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to get me to talk to you.”

“You followed me out here,” he points out.  “Or is this just a classic instance of Rey needing the last word.”

“I don’t  _ need _ the last word,” she snaps.  “I—”

But she doesn’t finish whatever it was she was about to say.  He lets the silence stretch out between them. She’s the one who’s trying to get him to stop talking to her after all.

Dameron’s street is quiet.  The window in the house across the way is flickering, as though its occupants are watching a movie in the dark.  Their TV doesn’t face the window, though, so Ben can’t even pretend he’s trying to work out what movie it is. He takes another drag on his cigarette, willing the nicotine to slow his heart right down.  

“Are you going to say something?”

“Which is it—that you don’t want me to talk to you, or that you do?” Ben asks.  It comes out more brutally than he intends. Or maybe it doesn’t. He’s not sure.  Sometimes Rey only gets real when you rip the rug out from under her, and all the lies she tells herself to get through the night suddenly can’t support her anymore.

He doesn’t look at her.  He doesn’t know what would be worse—that she’s glaring at him or that she’s crying.  Glaring because she hates him, crying because something tells him she’d try and push him away if he tried to comfort her.  

“How have you been?” she asks.

“Shitty,” he replies without missing a beat.  “You?”

“I’ve been good,” she says.

“So why are you sad?”

“Ben, don’t.”

“Why are you out here and why are you sad?  What are you trying to convince me of, Rey?”

“I’m not trying to convince you of anything.”

“Yourself, then?  What are you trying to convince yourself of?”

“Why are you always this impossible?”

“You know why better than anyone.”

It feels better than it should, boxing her into every little corner she tries to get out of.  She left _him_.  She’s trying to convince _him_ not to be upset with her, because even if she can’t admit that to herself, that’s why she’s out here in the cold, when her friends are waiting for her just inside the house.   _None of that makes you happy, Rey_ _,_ he thinks viciously.   _All your little lies—they don’t make you happy._

Ben had made her happy, once.  Until he hadn’t anymore. 

Now he doesn’t know what he is.

He finishes his cigarette and takes another one out of the box.  He doesn’t offer one to Rey. She’ll never smoke, he knows. Her foster father had smoked lots, and she hates the smell of tobacco.  

With a sigh, he puts the cigarette back in the box and tucks it into his coat.

“It’s worse, isn’t it?” she asks him.  “I left you and it made it worse.”

“Made what worse?”

“Your self-destructiveness.  It made it worse, didn’t it?”  He sees her hand gesture towards the cigarette box out of the corner of his eye.

Ben sighs.  “It’s never that easy,” he tells her.  “You know it’s never that easy.”

“Nothing’s ever easy with you.”  She sounds both fond and tired, and she shifts next to him on the steps as though she had realized that too.  

“I’ve missed you.”  She says it so quietly for a moment he thinks he’s hallucinating it.  “I’ve missed you, Ben. That’s why I’m sad. Things are harder when you’re around, but they’re also easier.”

Finally, he looks at her.  She’s staring across the street at Dameron’s across-the-street neighbor’s place too, her hands resting on her knees, and her chin resting on her hands.  

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he asks her quietly.  Oddly it does. Unsurprisingly, it also doesn’t.

“I don’t know,” Rey whispers.  “I don’t know anything.”

She’s definitely crying now.  She’s looking away from him and shaking in his jacket and he hears her trying to keep her tears quiet.  

Once upon a time, he would have pulled her into his lap, would have kissed her cheeks clear of tears, and held her, just held her, because that’s what Rey likes—being held.  He likes it too, holding her. It makes his heart relax.

But it’s none of his business if she looks sad or not, if she’s crying or not.

Fat fucking chance.

“And you’re scared of that?” he asks.

She looks at him and her eyes are already going puffy and red.  The tip of her nose is shining and she rubs at it with the back of her hand.  “What if this was a mistake?” she asks him point blank. “I keep missing you. When I was dating you, I had all this—this anger that you couldn’t just handle your shit.  And I know you hurt, and I know that you’ve got a lot to work through, but I was afraid I’d hate you if we kept going, I thought I was starting to hate you. And now I keep missing you, and you’re smoking again, and you just  _ leave _ when Finn tells you to, and you’ve never given in to Finn ever.  So what if I was wrong? What if I was only seeing the bad bits and it was blinding the good bits, and what if I ruined everything because I’m a failure at everything I try and I’m going to die alone.”

Her words get faster and faster as she says them, her tears flow shinier down her face, and she starts shaking again as she buries her face in her arms on her knees and Ben swallows.

“You’re not going to die alone,” he tells her.  

“I am if people keep leaving me behind and then I leave behind the ones that don’t.”

“You think Finn’s ever going to let you die alone?”   _ As if I ever am.  _ __ But it’s none of his business anymore.  Except that she’s here, telling him and not Finn.  “You—you weren’t happy.”

“I was,” she snaps.  “I was happy with you.  I was hopeful with you.”

“Not at the end you weren’t.  You just said it. And you know it’s the truth.  Just like,” his voice breaks and he clears his throat.  “Just like I do.”

“So I was right to leave you?”  

“You don’t need me to validate your every move, Rey.  I’m not your parents. I’m not your fucking boyfriend either.”  He knows it’ll hit her like a slap. But sometimes Rey needs a shock to her system.  Just like he needs a shock to his. He closes his eyes and still sees her shutting her door in his face sometimes.  “It was the brave thing to do, though,” he says as a balm. “Leaving me. So maybe that makes it right. Or maybe it doesn’t.”

“Brave?”

“Yeah,” he says.  “I have a lot to work through.”  He runs his fingers over his knuckles.  The bruising from his last session with that punching bag has faded but he can still feel it a little bit.  “And it was making you miserable. I couldn’t be what you wanted me to be. And you couldn’t be what I needed you to be without losing yourself entirely.  So it was brave to leave that. Even if it hurt us both.”

It winds him, saying the words.  

He’s spent weeks in a rage about it.  He’d have given her the universe if he could, he’d have loved her until his last breath if she’d have let him, and she’d wanted out?  How could she? She’d said she’d loved him, had told him she’d be there for him. And then there was that door, always closing, always always closing.  

“But you’ve always been braver than me.”  Suddenly he laughs, even though it’s not funny.  “I’m the one who would have held on to the very end on this one.  I’m still holding on.”

_ Time to let go. _

But he doesn’t want to.  He’s never been good at letting go, for all he’s told Rey that  _ she _ needs to let go.  She does. He does too.

What happens if he lets go?

“Yeah,” he says again.  “You’ve always been braver than me.”

“That’s not true,” she says quietly.  “You’re brave, Ben. You just fight for the wrong things and the wrong reasons.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t bravery involved.”

His chest feels tight, and he wants a cigarette but he can’t smoke when Rey’s around.  She hates it. She hates it, and she’d just called him brave. No one ever calls him brave.   _ Fuck up _ _ ,  _ and  _ juvenile _ _ ,  _ and  _ for god’s sake Ben get your act together _ , but never brave.  

He stares at her, and she stares at him.  Once, he would have kissed her. Once, he would have reached for her hand.  But instead he just stares now. Because he’s not anything to her, and she’s not anything to him.

“Do you think,” Rey whispers into the dull yellow light of Dameron’s porch, “That we could be friends?”

He tries to imagine it.  Texting her again, or going to movies but no cuddling, and no kissing, and no sex, and maybe she goes off with some other guy some time, who is better for her, who makes her happy, who doesn’t break shit all the fucking time because he’s too big for the world and too angry for humanity.

He shakes his head.

“No,” he says.  “I don’t think I could be friends with you after all this.  You and I are both too all or nothing for that.”

She exhales slowly.  She’d been expecting that.  

Slowly, she gets to her feet.  She takes off his jacket and hands it back to him.

“I guess,” she sighs at last.  “I guess. It was nice to think that maybe…” She sounds so sad.  He wants to swallow the words right back into his mouth, but he doesn’t dare.  It’s the truth. He won’t lie to her. There are enough lies in both of their lives already—he doesn’t need to pretend that he could do this one last thing for her.

“It was nice to see you, Ben,” she says without looking at him.  “I’ve missed you.”

He hears the door open, and shouts of laughter and music, then the door closing again, muffling the sound.

Ben takes out a cigarette, lights it, and stares out into the darkness.

Across the street, the movie must have ended.  The window is black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shameless cross project plug: also posting today are [135 fics to the Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's New Year Exchange](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RFFA_After_the_Blazing_Fire_Dies). I wrote a few but you won't know which until 1/8. That shouldn't deter you from checking them out! They're lovely!!


	2. Acts of Service

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter where disordered eating gets mentioned.

_ Leia’s in the hospital.  Major car accident. _ __

Rey sees the text from Poe come in on her lock screen and her heart goes cold.

_ Is she ok? _

_ They won’t tell me.  I’m not related to her. _

_ Ben’s on his way though.  So we’ll know soon enough I guess. _

Rey swallows as she stares at the words.

Her friends have, for the most part, stopped mentioning Ben completely.  It’s easy enough for them. They had only known him, had only cared about him through her.  But Poe’s a different matter.

For one thing, she’s not very close to Poe.  She’s friends with him because he’s friends with Finn.  He can be a little grating, truth be told, doesn’t really listen.  (Ben, her mind reminds her unhelpfully, had always listened.) And for another thing, Poe has known Leia his whole life.  Which means he’s known Ben too.

She changes text windows and scrolls down, down, down, to months before, when the last thing she’d received from him was:

_ Love you. _

They’d never been the types to text much.  Ben hated typing on his phone—his hands were too big for it and he got annoyed at the autocorrect.  So she doesn’t remember the context of the message. She doesn’t need to, she knows—she  _ knows _ she doesn’t need to.  But that doesn’t mean her mind isn’t immediately digging through her memory, in locked boxes and behind closed doors that have  _ Ben  _ written all over them, trying to remember.

A business trip, she thinks.  She’d always hated when he’d traveled for work.   _I_ _know you’re not going to leave me behind,_ she’d told him tearfully one night.   _But still.  Just. Please text me._

And he had.  

_ Love you. _

Because he had—loved her.

Rey takes a deep breath.

_ I heard about your mom—is there anything I can do? _

She doesn’t expect him to reply.  He hates texting and she doesn’t know if he’s talking to her.  She hadn’t heard from him or run into him in any way since that party at Poe’s two months ago, when he’d given her his jacket and hadn’t taken a second cigarette.  She doesn’t expect him to reply, but that doesn’t keep her from staring at her phone, wondering if he has his read receipts turned on, wondering if he’ll even see the message.

_I care about her too, Ben,_ she thinks.   _I hope she’s ok._

Her heart squirms again as she tries to imagine Leia, lying in some ER, doctors surrounding her yelling _CLEAR_ as they zap her with whatever that thing is that makes your heart restart.  Her face is battered and bruised because her head had banged against something and—

 _You’re just making yourself upset,_ Rey tells herself firmly as she puts her phone away.  She’d liked Leia. No, liked was the wrong word. She’d yearned for Leia, yearned for a mother the way she’d yearned for a father, someone who would care about her and care for her.  And Leia had, in her own way. Not the way she did about Ben, obviously. She wasn’t Rey’s mother. But she’d been happy to listen to Rey when she’d been nervous, she’d been supportive, she’d been _there_.  Rey had never asked Ben, but she suspected that Rey talked more to Leia than he did.

But that didn’t surprise her.  

Ben’s relationship with his parents was—well—

She takes a deep breath.

She can’t think about that now.  She can’t. Not when Leia’s in the hospital, not when Ben’s on his way there now, not when she’d been the one to leave him, had been the one to say that they weren’t supposed to care about one another that way anymore.

But that hadn’t stopped her caring about Leia.  

Rey bites at her nails, thinking.  There has to be something she can do, there has to be.  

Then her phone buzzes again, and a reminder from one of the health apps she uses to remind herself to hydrate pops up.

_ Have you eaten? _

It was stupid.  She’d grown up hungry, the idea that she needs to remind herself to eat is almost ridiculous.  She’d been close to  _ starving _ before, and ate voraciously whenever she could.  But it was Rose who had pointed out to her that if she’d been close to starving, and did eat voraciously, it didn’t mean that she was eating healthily, regularly, snacks to keep her going when she had trained her body and mind young to go without.  

She stares at the notification.

She hears the words in Leia’s voice.  It was almost always the first thing that she’d asked Ben and Rey whenever they’d shown up at her house.  Whether the answer was yes or no, she always had hummus for them, with carrots or a cucumber, that they’d both torn at.  Because Ben—well, Ben didn’t eat regularly either. He’d punished himself by not eating. 

He had so many ways in which he would punish himself.

_You need to eat,_ she thinks at Ben.  And knowing without knowing that his house will be devoid of food right now because he almost never has food in the house, Rey gets dressed.  She grabs an apple from the kitchen and takes a bite, pressing on the little notification to tell it that yes, she has eaten, and heads out the front door, locking it behind her.  

She gets into her car, still biting into the apple, and glances at her phone.  No reply from Ben, no update from Poe. 

She drives to the grocery store, parks, and heads inside, grabbing a shopping basket.  

When she shops for herself, she tries to get fresh fruits and veggies.  Her doctor had told her she has bad nutritional habits and that had seemed like the easiest solution.  Fruits and vegetables feel like a luxury, a reward, something that she hadn’t ever really dreamed of eating as a child and therefore something that makes her feel like she has reached for the stars and attained a power unknown whenever she loads berries and tomatoes into her shopping cart.

But Ben will likely let the fruits and vegetables go bad before he eats them.  Especially if—

Especially if something bad happens.  If Leia...if Leia…

So she takes herself to the health foods aisle instead and loads her basket with granola and health bars that have lots of protein in them until it is overflowing with boxes and the ones on top keep sliding off and on the ground.

“Are you alright?” someone asks, and it’s only then that she realizes how hard she’s breathing, that there are tears on her face.  Why can’t she ever do anything without crying? Why does she have to cry all the time now? She’d never cried as a child and now it’s like she’s letting all the tears flow that she’d stubbornly stopped at every possible moment.  Why couldn’t she just keep on going, optimistic and stoic as she’d done for years?

_ Because it’s bad for you when you do that, _ she can hear, unhelpfully in Ben’s voice.   _ Stop lying to yourself.  It only makes it hurt worse. _

“I’m fine,” she tells the concerned looking woman in yoga pants.  “It’s just—” she waves her hand. She can’t think of a thing she could say that wouldn’t make the conversation go on and if it does, she knows the tears will only go on harder.  “I’m fine.” And she hurries towards the cashier, trying to get a grip on herself. 

Ten minutes later, she is back in her car, checking her phone.  No texts at all. She decides that’s a good thing. Any change in status would mean she’d lose her nerve.  And she does not want to lose her nerve, not now, not ever.

She drives the familiar roads to Ben’s house, her hands and feet taking her there while she focuses on breathing.  She hadn’t been to his place since they’d broken up. He had dropped off her stuff two days afterwards with no note—just a box on her front porch containing all the things she’d left there—clothes, trinkets and tinkerings, books she’d forgotten about after she’d finished reading them.  She hadn’t had to go there to pack them up, return to that space that she’d spent such happy hours, where she’d felt safe and which she’d decided it wasn’t right for her anymore.

His driveway is empty, as she’d known it would be, and she pulls in, grabs the two bags of groceries from her second seat and makes her way to the front door.  She sets the bags on the ground and reaches for the familiar hook under his front steps and finds his spare key. Then she takes a deep breath and lets herself into the house.  

Her breath is shaky as she looks around.  It’s just how she remembers it—neat as a pin because Ben compulsively cleans, compulsively puts things back exactly where they belong.  The only sign that anyone lives here is the pile of mail on the counter by the door and, when she enters the kitchen, the unfinished bowl of oatmeal on the counter that he’d clearly been in the middle of when he’d gotten the news.  At least he’d eaten something today.

Rey sets the groceries down and goes to the bowl.  She empties it into the trash can and washes it for him, putting it on the dishrack to drip dry.  

Then she opens the cabinet that he keeps his protein powder in.  Unsurprisingly, it’s dusty because Ben never keeps food in the house.  He’d only sort of done it for her. She loads the shelves with the boxes she’d bought and leaves the cabinet open so he’ll see it when he comes home.

Then she turns and—

And her throat gets tight.  

She’s never been one for déjà vu, but this house just fills her with all sorts of memories.  

Sometimes, she’s bitter that Ben had said they couldn’t be friends when she’d seen him at Poe’s a few months ago.  Sometimes, she wants to call him and scream at him, because what gives him the right to know her better than she knows herself?  But the sight of the house from the door of the kitchen—well, everything floods her, as she stares at the couch she’d tried to ignore when she’d come through the door, the first place they’d kissed, the first place he’d fingered her until she’d been breathless, the first place she’d confessed that she loved him.  

This whole place smells like him, too—and the air is a little stale so she goes and opens the window because that’s always what she does in this house, opens the windows because why wouldn’t you want the air from the trees outside to fill your house.  The plants she’d bought for him have all died except for one succulent, which has grown so much that he’s repotted it under the window and Rey runs her fingers over its plump leaves. The dirt is a bit dry, so she returns to the kitchen to grab a glass of water and hydrate the thing.  He’d repotted it. He could have let it die, or could have thrown it against the wall until the ceramic pot shattered because he was always breaking things when he was angry. 

Another reason she hadn’t stayed.

Rey salvaged broken things, but what happened when the broken things kept breaking more things?  When would she be the one he broke?

_It was the brave thing to do, though,_ he had told her at Poe’s.  

_ I don’t think I could be friends with you after all this.  You and I are both too all or nothing for that. _

She puts the glass in the dishrack and hurries from the house, locking away the memories of Ben with his key and returning it to the hook under his stairs.

Then she goes home, numbly checking her phone at intersections again for updates, driving as carefully as she can because Leia has been in a car accident and is in the hospital.

Poe is the one who sends her the update an hour later.

_ She’s stable.  Should be discharged in a day or two.  Some damage that they want to keep her in to observe since she’s not getting any younger. _

And Rey breathes more easily.  She looks out of her bedroom window.  The sun is peaking out from behind the clouds.  

Ben doesn’t text her, but he doesn’t have to.  It’s probably better if he doesn’t. His mother is in the hospital, and things aren’t easy with his mother.  He’ll have more than enough on his mind without her. Especially since she’d been the one to end things.

But she wakes to a text from him the next day.

_ Thanks for the food.   _

She bites her lip as she stares at it.  He’ll have seen that  _ Love you _ . On the screen when he replied to her text too.  

_ Of course.  Please make sure you’re eating. _

And this time, his reply is immediate.

_ I will. _


	3. Receiving Gifts

“God, what on earth,” his mother mutters as she opens another dusty box, and pulls out yet another a stack of car magazines.  “I  _ told _ him to throw these out.  No wonder we have no space in the basement.”  She shakes her head—half exasperated, half fond.  More the latter than the former of late, now that his father is dead and not able to annoy her on a daily basis.

She looks at Ben. “More for recycling.”

Ben nods and he picks up the entire box and brings it to the increasingly large pile of things by the storm door.  It’ll be easier to take them straight out of the basement than to try and navigate the stairs and hallway with his arms full of his dad’s crap.  

“I’m probably going to have to make two runs,” Ben says, staring at the pile of boxes.  His dad had been a pack rat. Ben’s car is big, but the remnants of Han Solo…

He swallows.

“As many as you need,” his mother shrugs.  She’s sitting on the lumpy couch that Ben had used to curl up on when he locked himself in this basement, wanting the still and dark and quiet of the underground as a kid.  There’s a walking stick leaning against her leg and she’s wearing a loose fitting t-shirt, the likes of which he’d never ever seen her wearing before. He thinks it, too, might be a remnant of Han Solo, judging by the ratty nature of it.  That car accident over the winter had done a number on her shoulders and she has trouble raising her arms and a t-shirt is easier to manage than one of her more usual button-downs. Her hands tremble a lot more, now. Her grip is weaker. She loses her balance more.

_ She’s getting old. _ __ But he has trouble imagining his mother as  _ frail _ .  

It’s hot outside, but the gross kind of hot.  The it’s grey, and muggy, and please-please-please-rain sort of hot that makes sweat instantly begin emerging from his pores as he makes his way towards his car with the box of old car magazines.  An _it’s too early in the year for this_ kind of hot.  He fumbles with his keys for a second, then opens the trunk and dumps the box in unceremoniously.  

When he’s taken all the boxes up, he heads back downstairs.  His mother is still sitting on the sofa, staring off into space.  He’s not used to her, just sitting there like this. His mother is the type who always has something to do, who keeps herself busy because she’s better at being busy than she is at being still.  She’s good at what she does. She excels. And now she’s just sitting there, staring at the wall, her eyes faraway, remembering the husband and brother she’d lost.

“Need anything else?” Ben asks her quietly and she starts, her head jerking towards him, and her hand coming to rest over her heart.  She winces. She forgets which motions hurt her shoulder. “Mom,” he adds.

“I’m fine,” she tells him.  “I think that’s it,” she says.  “At least for today. We’re going to have to do Luke’s stuff next week, I think.”

Ben’s face clearly reveals the way his heart twists because his mother rolls her eyes.  “Look, if I die, you really aren’t going to want to do it on your own.”

That had been her logic for finally—after several years—going through the last of his dad’s crap.  And it’s triply true for Luke. If that car accident had killed her…

“Yeah,” he sighs.  “Yeah, I’ll come back next weekend.”

“And before then?” his mother asks and he pauses.  She’s got this sad and hopeful look in her eyes, this _please, baby, please talk to me,_ look that she’s had for more than half his life.   _Dad’s dead, Luke’s dead, it’s just us, please talk to me, please let’s stop hurting,_ her gaze seems to say.  

“I’m free Wednesday.  I could come by for dinner.”

Her eyes get suddenly very bright.  “I’d like that.” 

Ben helps her to her feet and walks her back upstairs, where she settles onto the couch with her laptop to grade papers and he lets himself out of the house.  

The ride to the dump is full of memories and Ben takes deep breaths as he goes.  Until his dad had died, Leia Organa had never been to the dump. That had been Han Solo’s contribution to the housework, and he’d always taken Ben with him, those dumb gilded dice that he loved so fucking much jangling from where they hung on the rearview mirror whenever the car had turned a corner.  

_Did she end up burying those with him?_ Ben wonders briefly.  He hasn’t seen them anywhere in the house, and his mom certainly didn’t have them hanging from the rearview of her car.  She doesn’t even have a car right now. She doesn’t want to drive. She’d never liked driving. Driving had been dad and Luke and, later, him.  And, even later, Rey.

 _I grew up in a dump,_ Rey had told him the first time they’d driven here together.   _My foster father ran one._

She had never liked talking about her past, had never liked talking about her pain.  Easier to smile and think about how bright her future looked than to confront the things that hurt her.  That was the difference between the two of them, maybe. Ben fixates on his past, on his pain; Rey refuses to acknowledge it.

He’d felt hopeful, sort of, when they’d been together.  He’d thought about a future that wasn’t miserable for the first time with her.  And Rey—she’d let herself cry about her parents.

_ It wasn’t all bad _ _ ,  _ he thinks sadly as he pulls into the dump.  Again with this heat. He hated muggy heat, he hated the beginning of summer.  Rey had always wilted in muggy heat. She’s a desert child, she can do dry but the second the humidity’s higher than normal she feels almost feverish.  He hopes she’s inside today, in a place with climate control. Even if that means she’s colder than she wants to be. She can handle cold. Just not humidity.  

“What you got?” asks one of the dump workers as Ben opens the back of his car.

“Lots of recycling,” he says.  Together, they take the magazine boxes over to the station for them and dump out their contents, then flatten the boxes and bring them over to the cardboard recycling.  It takes all of a minute and a half and as Ben’s getting back into his car, he hears the worker shout, “Hey—this yours?”

He’s holding dad’s dice in his hands, glinting gold in the grey day, and Ben swallows.  

“Yeah,” he says slowly and gets back out of the car and holds out a hand.  The worker nods as he drops the dice into them and Ben’s hand tightens around them at once.  They’re warm from the warm day, and his jaw tightens at the weight of them. 

When he’s back in the driver’s seat again, he stares at the dice again for a long second.  Dad had hung them up immediately in every car he’d ever driven, but Ben doesn’t want to hear them jangling every time his car goes round a corner.  He doesn’t want to think about his dad. He doesn’t want to think about any of this. He doesn’t want to think about his dad.

He throws the car into reverse and backs out of the dump’s parking area.  Had his mom been trying to throw them out because she didn’t want them either?  She’s never been to the dump so she wouldn’t know they wouldn’t just take the box whole and that’d be that, they separate out magazines from cardboard.  Or maybe she’d been trying to give them to him, a way to remember his father by.

As if he could ever forget.

_I don’t want them,_ he thinks angrily.  He hadn’t wanted any of the things his dad had left him.  He’d sold the car, he’d closed the small shipping business, he’d given Chewie most of the weird knick-knacks that his dad had thought that maybe the son he’d never understood would want.

And now he has the dice sitting on his dashboard, sliding back and forth when he turns a corner which is almost worse than jangling.

_ Keep me lucky _ _ ,  _ he remembers his dad telling Rey with a crooked smile when she’d asked where he’d gotten them.   _ Something from my dark and dangerous youth.  I always get where I’m going when I got them. _

_They’re lovely,_ Rey had said.

And maybe they are.  Ben had always thought they were tacky, but through Rey’s eyes—

He swallows.  

They’d both had to claw their way out—Rey and his dad.  They both hated talking about it. They’d both understood that in one another, and quickly.

She deserves Han’s luck more than Ben does.

And before he has even decided, he takes a right where he should be taking a left and a moment later, he’s driving to Rey’s for the first time in months.  Closer to a year than not. God has it really been that little time? He spends so much time trying not to think about her—and failing—trying not to hurt from her—and failing—that it feels like eons since she’d told him to leave.

_ I can’t carry your darkness for you, Ben, but you have trouble letting go of it, and I can’t do this anymore. _

He hadn’t felt dark since she’d gone, though.  Not the same sort of dark, not the blistering black anger.  He’d mostly just felt empty.

He parks, grabs the dice and gets out of the car.  Finn’s car is nowhere in sight, but Rey’s is in the driveway, which means there’s about a seventy percent chance she’s not at home right now.  

He takes a deep breath right in front of her door, preparing to knock and déjà vu hits him—hard—and he’s back at the beginning of it all, nervous because sure, she’d said yes to a date, but she spits fire and doesn’t let him get away with his bullshit and does she even really like him or is this some cruel joke but Rey doesn’t seem like the type of person to make a cruel joke so maybe she does actually want to get to know him better, and the spitting fire is because he’s always deserved it.

The door opens and there she is, in a tank top and no bra and a pair of shorts.  “Ben?”

“Hi,” he says slowly.

“What are you doing here?”  He’d expected a defensive edge to her voice, a  _ how dare you be on my doorstep remember the last time you were here? _ , a  _ just because I got you food when your mom was in the hospital a few months ago that was for her not you _ .  But it’s not there.  It’s as if—well—as if he’s shown up unexpected and he’s not the scum of the earth in her eyes.

“We were cleaning up my dad’s stuff finally,” he tells her.  “Me and mom.”

He watches as her face changes slowly, as she processes lightning quick everything that could mean, everything he doesn’t want to explain and everything he doesn’t have to because she’s Rey and she already knows.

She opens her mouth, clearly about to say something, probably ask him how he’s doing because he’s here and she knows everything, but she can’t carry his darkness anymore, he has to do it, so he says before she can, “Here.  He’d want you to have this.”

He holds out the dice for her to take and she stares at them.

“Ben, I can’t take this,” she says at last, looking back up at him.  Her eyes are bright and she’s going to cry and if she cries, he’ll cry and he’s not going to cry about his dad.

“You can.  You should.  I want you to have them.  He’d want you to have them.”

Han had always gotten on so well with Rey, so easily.   _ Like the daughter I never had _ _ ,  _ he’d joked one night, and Ben had been too happy because Rey made him happy to even take it personally.  He doesn’t take it personally now. 

“Please,” he says to her.

She holds out her hand, and Ben lets the dice slip through his fingers the way that Rey had.  They land on her palm and she closes her fingers tightly around them.

“Thank you,” she whispers, though whether it’s to him or his dad he doesn’t know.

“I’ll see you around,” Ben says, knowing he won’t.  He turns, and is almost back to his car when he hears Rey call after him, “I’ll see you around.”


	4. Quality Time

The house is very empty.

Rey doesn’t like it.  

Her house is supposed to be full of life—the plants that she keeps in all the windows, friends that are always coming and going because they know where she keeps her spare key (in ceramic frog that sits among the lavender in her garden), or even just the quiet sounds of someone else moving about the house every now and then, going to the bathroom, going to get more water, or a snack, or just changing rooms.

But the house is silent now. Empty.  Lifeless.

Jess had forgotten to look in on her plants while she’d been out of town, leaving Rey scrambling to try and resuscitate them with water and sheer force of will.  Poe and Oddy and the rest were always more Finn’s friends than hers. And Finn, of course, has moved in with Rose, meaning that even the sound of him struggling with the coffee grinder that Rey got on bargain and refuses to replace even though it’s a good thirty years old—it’s just not there.

He hadn’t abandoned her. That much, she knows.  He texts her frequently—little inane thoughts, and things that have just been happening.  He sends her pictures of how he and Rose are figuring out the layout of their new place, and sometimes a perplexed selfie because Rose is even more of a stickler for mechanical and electronic setup than Rey is.

Rey smiles at them all, and replies to every text, and goes back to her yellowed and browned plants. Wilting and dying.

Just like everything else in her life, so it seems.  

The house is full of memories.  Her and Finn lounging on the couch, eating popcorn and watching terrible movies; taking the washing machine apart and putting it back together so it ran more quietly; Ben, sitting on the stairs and waiting for her after catching her in the middle of a project before their date because she’d lost track of time and she needs to find a stopping point, please just wait a few minutes.

The memories bring the place to life—though not in a way that Rey likes.

_You should go,_ she’d told Ben, biting back her own anger.  Had she been angry? Right now, she feels like she’d been crying, but Rey had learned a while ago that she shouldn’t always trust her memories.  Ben had taught her that. _You know the truth.  Go on. Say it._

Angry, and pitiless and somehow what she’d needed to hear.  At least just then. And then, there had been a time when he couldn’t give her what she wanted.

And what does she want now?

She’d told him she’d wanted to be friends with him.  It had been painful when he’d said no to that; it had been a relief as well.  A clean break. Everyone says a clean break is hard, but it heals the best. The only clean breaks Rey has ever known are Ben and her parents, and she can’t say the latter healed anywhere near close to best. And Ben…

And then, to make matters more confusing, he’d shown up on her doorstep a month ago with his father’s dice, pressing them into her hands and leaving without a word.  She’d hung them in her room, away from Finn’s disapproving eyes because if Ben could tell her truths, Finn could too, and Finn’s truths of _you are romanticizing him now that you’re not together anymore_ had echoed far too much of Ben’s _you know the truth._

Memory isn’t trustworthy.  

Looking forward—she can see what is right, what to do.  It’s looking back that has always thrown her.

And right now her future feels empty like this house, lifeless like her plants, and lonely like the friends who go to the other side of town and Finn’s new place rather than digging the house key out of her frog’s mouth.

_ Eat something _ _ ,  _ she tells herself, the way she has learned to when she is feeling low.  When she’d been little, she hadn’t needed to eat to keep herself in a good mood, but then again she’d always been a stubborn thing, and now that she’s not starving her body has different needs.  Or maybe she is just remembering it wrong.

She goes into the kitchen and grabs a granola bar and a banana and plays a geometry game on her phone as the food settles in her stomach.

Ben had been the one to introduce her to geometry games.  They are soothing. Peaceful. Everything lining up the way they are supposed to so long as she can just move the pieces into place.

It hurts that pieces move out of place in her life so easily and she feels like she’s falling.

Finn had always been there to catch her when she falls.

And so had Ben, in his own way.

_ Don’t _ , she can hear Finn tell her.  He’d grabbed her phone out of her hand during the first few weeks after she’d left Ben, after she’d shut him out of her life, when her memory had started to duel her conviction and make her question whether it had been right.  

But Finn’s not here, and Ben had brought her his father’s dice, and had told her she’d been right to leave him, and despite his anger, despite his brutality, despite the way sometimes he made her want to scream at him that that’s _not_ how you treat other people, he had never once failed to catch her when she fell.

_ Finn’s moved out and I’m miserable. _

She reads the text three times.  No beating around the bush, no anything.  She feels weak, reading it over. She feels helpless.  Ben’s the only person she’d ever let see her like that.

She hits send.

She lets the tears fall when she goes back to her geometry game, creating infinity loops and circles and lines until her phone buzzes in her hand and a little notification tells her that Ben’s replied.

_ Want me to come over? _

And then another, quick on its heals.

_ Just for company.  You’re not alone, even if you think you are. _

It makes her cry harder and she nods at her phone, raising the back of her hand to her lips and letting out a sob.  Her fingers shake as she types,

_ Yes, please. _

And she feels better almost immediately.  Ben doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t expect him to.  She never expects him to reply via text. The fact that he had to begin with within five minutes of her texting him was nothing short of a miracle.  

She goes to her sofa and curls up sideways on it and stares at her phone, trying not to listen to the passing cars on the street outside, trying not to let her heart lurch with the knowledge that she wasn’t going to be alone very soon.

She hears the crunching of the key in her front door and sits up, rubbing her face as Ben lets himself into the house.  He takes off his shoes—habit. Finn had always insisted that people take off their shoes, but he doesn’t live here anymore as Rey gets up and goes into the hallway.

“Hi,” she says a little breathlessly.

“Hi,” he replies.  He’s still so tall.  His hair is longer now even than it was a few months ago when she’d last seen him.  It’s starting to look overgrown, rather than purposeful. 

“Thanks for—”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Tea?”

His lips twitch—not towards a smile, but with a recognition.  Rey hates tea. Everyone always assumes she’ll like it, she seems to give off a tea demeanor, but tea is unreliable and she gets her kicks from coffee.  Ben likes tea though. Calming, he’d told her once. The energy sticks in his system longer. 

“I’m good,” he replies.

“Good, because I only have tea you’d hate.  Finn took all the good stuff.”

“I figured.”  Ben looks around, and she can tell he’s appraising the house—what’s gone and what’s the same.  “He moved in with Rose?”

“Yeah,” Rey replies.  

“Things getting serious, then.”

“In the past few months, yeah,” she replies.  “I think they’re trying to decide if they’re going to get married or not.”  Once, she’d let herself fantasize about marrying Ben. Instead, she had closed the door in his face while he’d looked like he was going to cry.  And now he’s here.

“Good for them.”  She can tell he doesn’t really care.  He had cared about her friends because he’d cared about her, but had never fostered relationships with them, but now that they’re not dating, he doesn’t have to have anything more than a detached interest in them.  “You planning on getting another roommate?”

“I dunno,” Rey says. She sighs.  She hasn’t let herself think about this.  Leave it to Ben to find the one thing she doesn’t want to think about.  “I don’t want to replace him.”

“There’s a difference between replacing Finn and not being by yourself,” Ben points out.   _Y_ _ou hate being by yourself,_ he doesn’t say out loud, but she can see it in his eyes. _That’s why I’m here._

_ Isn’t it? _

“How’ve you been?”

“Stop deflecting.”

“Fine but we’re coming back to that because otherwise you’re deflecting.”

“Fair enough.”

Rey stares at him and he stares back.  “Couch?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he replies and follows her into the living room.  It’s sparse. Finn took the TV and two of the armchairs and had left her with the sofa they’d found on the side of the street and which had not—despite Ben’s dire predictions—had bedbugs. Ben sits on one side of it and Rey on the other, tucking her knees against her chest, leaning her back against the armrest.  “I don’t know,” she says again. “His name’s on the lease, so it’d have to be a sublet, and I don’t know if I want to go through the stress of finding someone for the next four months. I can cover the rent on my own.” She lets out a morose laugh. “Finn joked that I could turn his bedroom into a workshop or something.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Ben says.

“Why?” Rey asks, preparing herself for some snide comment about how Finn’s…something.  Ben has always had some snide comment about Finn.

“Because every time you go in there, you’ll think about how he’s not there anymore and it’ll turn your work into something you hate because of it.”

And there’s Ben again, the way he always is, telling her what she needs to hear, even if she doesn’t want to hear it.  Tears prickle at the corner of her eyes again and she rubs at her face furiously. Once, he would have pulled her towards him, kissed her.  Now he just sits there watching her, knowing her too well to be comforting. Which, in its own odd way, is comforting. 

“I don’t want to die alone,” Rey whispers.  It’s been niggling at her, ever since that night on Poe’s porch last fall, this absolute terror that no one’s ever able to soothe right out of her.

To her surprise, Ben laughs.  “Join the club.” She glares back at him and he bobs his head a little bit.  “You’re significantly less likely to die alone than I am. You’re more likeable.”  He’d said something similar then, too.

“Well, if you stopped throwing things through windows,” Rey said, rolling her eyes.  “That’s just terrifying, Ben. It’s just—”

“Yeah, I got it,” Ben replies, his tone clipped, and Rey stops short.  

And suddenly, for all the familiarity of him, she’s even more aware that they’re not friends.  They’re not lovers. They’re not anything. Except that they’ve been everything.

“How have you been?” she asks him again quietly.

“Angry,” he says at once.  “Sad. Lonely.”

“So the same as—”

“In different proportions, but yeah.  It’s not easy getting over you, you know.”

Rey bites her lip.  

“Are you?  Over me?”

Ben looks at her his dark eyes so heavy all of a sudden.  “I’ve stopped drinking,” he tells her. “Smoking too. I got promoted at work, though I hate my team so I’ll probably quit and find a new one.  I’m talking to my mom regularly. I’m eating every day. When I’m not thinking about you, I think I’m fine. But sometimes you hit me like a truck and I don’t think that’ll ever change.  I don’t think it’s possible to be over you.”

It’s like the porch all over again, when he’d told her he didn’t think they could just be friends.  Relief and sadness all at once.

She tucks her knees up to her chest and stares at him.  “Those changes,” she begins slowly, and he laughs again—a bitter thing that doesn’t even begin to sound humorous.

“Yeah, they’re because of you,” he says darkly.  “But also not. I got tired of being in my own skin, and didn’t like who I was, and maybe I’d be less likely to die alone if I worked on turning into someone I could actually stand to be around.  Because I couldn’t even stand to be around myself.”

“That’s great, Ben,” Rey whispers because her throat’s suddenly clogged.  “That’s really—”

“It sucks, really,” Ben says.  “Because it makes the progress feel like nothing.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not progress.  Do you like yourself more?”

Ben’s gaze flickers, his eyes darting back and forth between each of hers.  “I don’t know,” he says. “I want to. That feels like something I guess. There’s a difference between caring about yourself and liking yourself.”

Rey knows that all too well.  She stares at Ben. _More ways in which we’re inverse, I suppose,_ she says.  She’d always liked herself.  It had taken her years—or, more specifically—Finn and Ben—to realize that didn’t mean she cared about herself.

But of course Ben knows that, he’s probably following it in her face right now, reading her mind the way he always has been able to—that part of her that speaks to him in a way that nothing and no one else ever has.

“Ben,” she whispers but he looks away and she stops.  

“You don’t get to care about me this way anymore, remember?” he bites out.

“But you still care about me,” she tells him.  “You said—”

“Please don’t,” he cuts her off heatedly.  “Don’t pity me. I can take a lot, but I can’t take your pity.”

So Rey doesn’t say another word.  She just wraps her arms around her knees and watches him, waiting for him to get angry the way he used to, to get up and leave her just like everyone else.  But he doesn’t. 

The anger frustration in his face fades and Rey swallows.

“Do you want to watch a movie or something?” she asks him quietly.

“Sure,” he says, and she can tell from his voice that he has no interest, that he is humoring her.

So they turn on a dumb action flick, and then it’s sequel, and midway through the third movie, Rey wakes up without realizing she’d been asleep to find that Ben is still there.

He’s asleep as well, and Rey wants to—she really wants to reach out to him, to curl up with her head on his lap the way she had done while they’d been together.

But they’re not together.

And does it matter why they broke up if he’s working on changing the things she’d found unbearable?

Maybe.  Maybe not.  She’s not sure, somehow.  But she’s not sure her heart could stand breaking over him again, so she does not move.  She just sits there and watches the movie without really seeing it. The soundtrack is Ben’s light snores and her own beating heart.  The plot is the swirling confusion in her mind.


	5. Physical Touch

The day is bright, the yellowing leaves overhead rustle gently in a soft breeze.  It’s neither too humid nor too dry. It’s neither too hot, nor too cold. It’s the sort of day that his mother would have enjoyed because it wouldn’t have required a sweater and she wouldn’t have had to worry about the emphysema making it hard for her to breathe.

So the irony is not lost on him that she’s not breathing, that she’s feet away from him in a box while someone drones on and on about her accomplishments, about her love for her family, for her community, about her integrity, about her everything.

_ You won’t want to go through the boxes alone when I’m gone _ _ ,  _ his mother had told him when they’d gone through his dad’s and uncle’s stuff.  She’d been right. About that, and so much else.

He stares at the coffin.  It’s plain. His mother would have hated some of the more expensive options the mortician had told him about.   _ I’m going to be underground.  I don’t give a shit. _

They’d asked him if he wanted to say some words.  That’s customary, he supposes. But he hadn’t taken them up on it.  He doesn’t think his brain works in straight lines anymore. It jolts back and forth painfully, focusing on little things, dancing around the one big thing, trying to keep him from—

_ I’m fine _ _ ,  _ she’d told him in the hospital after that car crash.  She hadn’t looked fine. There’d been bruising all over her face and her shoulder was in a sling and there were all sorts of tubes and cords plugged into her.  They wanted to keep her longer because she was older, because they think she suffered a mild heart attack and needed monitoring.

His mom—she’s short now so it shouldn’t be weird that she’s small.  He’s not her little man anymore, stand up straighter let’s see how much you’ve grown.

He’s not anyone’s little man anymore.

It’s just him now.  Time to pack up the boxes in his mom’s place, time to parcel her away the way they’d done dad, the way they’d done Luke.  To fit lives away in cardboard because at the end, we’re all just dust anyway.

He’s always thought it’s strange that people are allergic to dust.  Dust is just dead skin cells. Does that mean that, fundamentally, people are allergic to themselves?

He’s allergic to himself.  

He’s not allergic to dust.

He just stares at the box as they lower it into the ground.  People start to trickle away, he hears hushed voices, some snuffling of someone crying.  He should be crying. He should be screaming. Why isn’t he screaming?

A hand slips into his, warm and small and it’s only then that he realizes how cold he is.  She squeezes his hand tightly, holding it and when he looks at her.

It’s strange to see Rey in black.  She’d always been one for lighter colors.  

She doesn’t say a single word.  She just holds his hand and stands with him and slowly, slowly, his mind stops swirling and he can hear his own breath again.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/crossing_winter) and on [pillowfort](http://pillowfort.io/crossingwinter)!


End file.
